460-560 Recall

As far as I know,it was the differential carrier bearings.The ball bearings were replaced with tapered rollers that were stronger. Enough to handle the horsepower.And as read in a book somewhere,It was a mechanic in a 'backwater' dealership who figured out the 'fix' that IH adopted.However,there people here who are smarter than I am and they will surely set me straight.
 
I have heard they were trying to stay ahead of john deere by developing a bigger tractor. they got in a hurry and the 560 international was built from the W6, and easy to see that. the 6 cyl. engine was to powerful for the old driveline. I thought it was that they were in the process of the 06 series and this 60 series was a fill in. and that this mistake pretty much broke ihc as they fell behind john deere after that and never recovered. I have a farmall 560 with that triangle on the serial # plate indicating the tractor was recall completed. don't know every detail in the upgrade.
 
Went over this several times over the years and just covered some the other day. New differential to accept tapered roller bearings. New housings that support differential and accept much larger ball bearings on the new bull pinion gears that match the new bull gears that have a 25 degree pressure angle verses 20 degree old ones.

Later an additional improved bearing package was released that included flat bower roller bearings on inside axle, new looser fit outer axle ball bearing, new lubrication tube to lube bull pinion bearings and new pinion bearing. Tapered shim on right side of differential for better even loading of differential bearings under heavy load.

That bearing package was not a recall but had a very special price on the bearings. Probably less than half price.

The 460 bearing package also had bower flat roller bearings on the bull pinions but the 560 did not. Actually the 460 had a lot more failures because people replaced their Super M's and power packed M's with a 460 in a lot of cases.

Once most of these tractors were relieved of their heavy tillage duties, when 06 series came
along, very little repairs in rear. Still a lot of them here in the country a well liked tractor.

When IH introduced these tractors they advertised the 560 as a five bottom tractor and the 460 as four bottom. They had plowing demonstrations in this area doing just that. Well, the 806 was more of a 5 bottom rig as it turns out. Sure, some 806's pulled six but all the ones we sold did five or less.
 
The 06 series as I understand was a reaction to the newly released New Generation tractors. I've never heard the 60 series described as a fill in line. What may make the 06 look like it was already in progress was the D282 already existed in the 560 and the D361 came out of the truck division so that development was essentially in place. This allowed IH to have the 06 series out around two years after the release of the JD tractors The main task was settling on a transmission which became a 4X2 and then upgrading the TA. While the 60 series was a black eye that really had very little to do with IH's eventual demise.
 
Well i disagree with that, they almost voted to stop making tractors, it was 51% ya and 49 % nay, heard that from many people! But naturally i wasn't there ! If i had a $20:00 bill for everybody i knew that traded a 560 for a 4010 or 4020 and put that money on compound interest, i would be be a rich man toda
 
I never mentioned board voting but in that respect ,yes, IH board and stockholders were very divided over the continuation of farm equipment from the early 1960's until the end in the 1980's. The major issue was what was perceived to be superior profit prospects in the truck division. I got this straight from a man who worked for IH at corporate in Chicago. The same man was the one who talked about the development of the 06 series.
 
Development for the 4010 started in late 1953. The secret was kept until the last few months. It became obvious when the Waterloo Works bumped up production on the 730 at a rate greater than sales which suggested a change over was coming. The New Generation intro was pushed back because JD experimented with ideas such as a V configuration engine which was a dead end. The intended release year was 1958. When it was obvious that 1958 was simply impossible the 20 series 2 cylinder was reworked into the 30 series.
 
Why? The 720 was already in production with most of the same features as the 730 so IH was not gaining in that respect. The major reason as has been told that IH was stretched in terms of development budget so IH could not do much more than upgrade the M. Usually a manufacturer counters another builder by exceeding that builder than match it if possible. As far as the 60 series being a bridge line that would imply development most likely started by 1956 so for a decision to be made for a bridge the current project most likely would have been going for a couple of years to know the state of affairs. No way the 06 series took nearly a decade to get from the design board to off of the assembly line.
 
Part of the reason JD surged ahead was the New Generation had features that farmers craved such as improved operator comfort in terms of steering and brakes along with more responsive hydraulics. The chief advantage of the 806 and 856 was raw engine power and speed selection which did not matter for quite a number of farmers. To run a 2 row corn picker, 150 bushel manure spreader, or small square baler a farmer really did not need all the power of a 90 plus HP tractor as the implement would not handle being maxed out in terms of input. For many farmers it mattered to be efficient in ground covered by changing speed based on crop density in a particular section of a field. A multi-speed full power shift made this pretty easy to do versus clutching then shifting. Had the 06 series had more of the JD features it most likely would have taken more of the market.
 
I heard about the board voting also but then the Deere board had some rumors also about their 4 wheel drive tractors. I heard they were thinking very serious about quitting them after they got done with all those updating on the early ones. The one mechanic where I later worked at the Deere dealer, worked all year updating those. Lot of major parts went into them.
 
It was not quitting. Versatile was available for purchase. JD would have bought Versatile but the government would not approve the purchase because of anti-trust considerations.
 
I think that guy was feeding you BS. What the plant manager at FARMALL was telling us as late as 1981, just weeks before starting production of the 5x88 series was that the AG division was WAY more profitable than any other division, especially trucks and construction equipment. Too many purchased components used in trucks, engines, transmissions, axles, and IH had equipment to MAKE all that stuff, Why spend CASH to buy it? As an IH stock holder from my retirement account the Company stock reports stated clearly that they realized the risk of putting their future in the truck production business because the trucks made less profit but cost more cash to build.
Plant manager told us, IF the market for ag tractors 70 to 170 hp was large enough to crank production up from 105 to 150 per day that FARMALL PLANT alone could have bailed IH out of debt in one year. FARMALL bought enough from other IH plants that Melrose Park engines couldn't keep up, East Moline off-loaded a couple Million Dollars worth of tractor parts to the Canton, Ill plow plant, Louisville Foundry and Forge shop could barely keep up at 105 per day, castings would have had to be transferred to the Indianapolis Plant, Memphis Plant.
Problem was the ENTIRE tractor sales, all brands were 125-150 per week, at the reduced 105/day schedule we were running we would have been out of work by Tuesday Noon.
Maybe things were different in the late 1950's early 1960's, but evidently somebody believed the tractor business held promise or why did IH bother to build the 56, 66, and 86 series? Or the 2+2? Or the 5x88's?
If IH was short of anything else besides CASH to fund R&D, it was ENGINEERING MANPOWER to do all the research and testing needed to keep all their product lines using leading edge technology. That's why Deere buys so many small companies now days.
 
That sounds like quitting to me. Much like CaseIH quit the Case rigid frame 4 wheel and purchased Steiger.
 
Sure, Farmall was profitable in the late 1970's early 1980's compared to the truck division. That mainly happened due to the recession that cut heavily into truck sales. As I said before this schism in management and stockholder blocks went all the way back to the early 1960's. There were years that ag out did transportation and when it did ag got the support it needed for new projects. It was never all one way where only one side prevailed all the time. As far as what is produced versus what is bought to make a product the largest factor is net profit. Love me IH silage equipment but the reality was since the mid-1960's there was very little money in building such products for IH and the company dealt with that on a short term basis by moving production into Canada. The 50 forage harvester down in my shed as we speak and the long gone 40 blower were made in the Quad Cities while the 720 forage harvester the neighbor has was made in Hamilton, ON Canada. I find interesting that when I heard this man speak there was still an IH company that headquartered in Chicago. He made the observation that it would not surprise him that IH became a truck company which just a few years later it did. BS or somebody close to the pulse of management at the time? Any IH ag dealers of which this man was one around 1980 that had a deep understanding of what was going on in Chicago was loading up with as many sidelines as possible during the 1970's as the feeling was growing that IH ag may not be forever lived. A fair number of IH dealers also had New Holland, Hesston, Deutz, Will-Rich, etc.
 
All the Ag companies bought product ideas from independents or companies that had tightly drawn patents. Was a giant such as IH quitting when it did not develop its own tillage line when it bought P & O? Just the nature of business and not a test of manhood.
 
I bet your talking about Paul Wallem. I bought his book, THE BREAKUP. I'm well aware that IH made some good silage equipment. Thing I find universally accepted was the #56 & #60 silage blowers. BTO I worked for part time from 1968 to 1978 owned ONE piece of IH equipment, a #56 blower. Most everything else was Deere. Had a Case 420 construction king loader tractor he couldn't have farmed without. And he bought a slightly used 2470 Traction King 4wd about 1974. I pulled the same chisel plow twice as fast as his 4320 did the year before. And it rode so much smoother on 28Lx26 tires.
IH was the class leader in over-the-road semi-tractors back in the '60's and '70's, probably the '50's too. They lost that lead but gained the lead in medium duty straight-trucks, but they've lost that now too. And they don't even make Powerstroke engines for Ford anymore. And if anything, the need for trucks to haul the orders in/out of Amazon warehouses is only going to increase.
I see the AGCO brands of tractors in the Super-Stock classes at PPL and NTPA tractor pulls, and figure they are somebody's old re-skinned D-21 with a Deere engine in them. I do NOT see any of them sitting in farm yards, or in fields working. And I see more red CIH tractors every season. And I'm pretty sure all the 1206, 1066, 1486 looking tractors have DT-466's in them. IH had a limited amount of good engineering talent. They couldn't make a significant impact on the world making the perfect silage chopper, or silage blower, but making the IH 400-series engines to power trucks, tractors, combines, THAT could make an impact. Yes, IH probably used the TA too long, but it sure beat ANYTHING Deere had from 1954 to 1964. And every other tractor company made something similar to the TA during that time. The Melrose Park, Illinois plant IH designed and built the 300&400 series engines at also built bulldozers, in fact dozers was their main product. That half of the plant was sold to Dresser Industries along with the Libertyville, Ill plant, the Italians bought Dresser and now they're gone.
I saw Max Armstrong tour the CIH/New Holland tractor plant in Racine on TV a month ago. He said there's something like 350 assemblers building red & blue tractors now. They must be BUYING more of the parts complete than we did back at FARMALL in 1980. We employed 3500, TEN times as many people. Back when FARMALL made most of their own castings, and they really really built ENGINES in the Engine Building, one of the few distinguishable things left at the Farmall plant, they employed 6500 people. Farmall back then didn't keep as many other IH plants busy, or as many truck drivers employed hauling parts to FARMALL. But it was probably more profitable.
Thing I always think about, it was actually a good thing Tennaco bought IH and merged it with CASE, they could afford to spend the time and money to make the synchro-tri-six trans in the 5x88 ALL it could really be, and released it as the Magnum, did the same thing with the axial flow combine. Didn't have to worry about excavators, endloaders, scrapers, dozers, well, Case made a few of those, but at least their goal wasn't to knock CAT out of the #1 spot like IH wanted to do. IH not only had a money, or more correctly, a capital problem, trying to fund the necessary engineering work to be technically the #1 company in all the markets they competed in, they needed the manpower to do it quickly enough so they never lagged behind the competition again. And remember, the competition has that exact same goal!
 
Not my point at all. Just that IH was not the only mfg who had a major problem with a product and dumped lots of warranty money into making corrections. I know very well many products were developed by others and picked up by major mfgs.

Every body gets on IH about the 60 series tractors and say nothing about the recall (if you want to call it that) on the Deere four wheel drive.

The mechanics where I worked in my later years, said the over head hoist was tied up all year updating them.
 
Nobody had an abundance of engineering talent so each company picked and chose what it thought were the most promising products to build. All the ag companies had sub par products here and there. For IH it did make sense to invest heavily into engines given the products they were trying to sell and for the most part they did a very good job.

I don't have a problem with the TA and like anything else poor education can turn a non-problem into a problem. What hurt IH worse was being late to the full power shift game and it hurt pretty bad. As said before if IH could have gotten into the power shift during the run of the 806-856 IH would have sold more of those tractors. I think that many guys would have given IH another go even after 460-560 tractors. It was not about abandoning IH but buying tractors that had appealing features. Now if a guy needed a bull tractor for 80 percent of its annual hours a farmer would really have to consider an 806-856. Most farms back then around here were dairies with maybe 300-400 acres that bought 90 HP tractors and maybe bulled it a few days a year. Other than that these same farmers parked their 1950's tractors for the creature comforts of a 4020 even though the 1950's tractor would have spread the manure or cut the hay just the same.

As to the IH products themselves I thought a fair number were as good as anything else built at the same time. We have had a fair number on this farm considering we are not diehard about any one brand. Most of the tillage here is IH. At one time the planter and drill were IH. I had an used 400 cyclo shortly after college and while I had no problem with the air system the seed closing system left a lot to be desired. Also, in stony fields the seed delivery tubes swayed too much. Despite all that I looked at an 800 cyclo used but the dealer wanted too much so I found a good deal on a JD 7000. We have a M and 986 here plus tried out a 1466 and 3388 back in the day. Would not mind a Super M and a 766.

I know that Tenneco was the reality but thought IH would have done better if it could have made it on its own. White Farm got its white knight so to speak during the late 1970's though it ultimately did not save it and it would have been nice if some investment group had stepped forward to purchase IH to run it as a stand alone company. Revisiting IH management during the 1970's I had heard that it and the stockholders were marching towards being run by those with no direct connection to agriculture. Pretty hard to rev things up in terms of ag equipment development if more and more managers and stockholders don't care to do so. It just got easier and easier to turn away from ag if it had a poor year profit wise.
 
From what written info that I've read the only tractor IH was worried about was the Oliver 880, which had 64 horse power. And they had more or less direct start diesels. And they were cheaper to build and also repair. Plus the six cylinder engine didn't have the vibration problem that the large four cylinder ones did. When the ag industry switched from the engine driven balers and combines and other pull type machines to independent PTO that were driven at max RPM you had a vibration problem. Also in one of my IH books it was stated that the engineers were only going to replace the four cylinder engine with the six. But the sales department wanted something more that they could sell. could the horse power be increased? engineering said yes. Their is your problem. I only know what I've read in books. I think I will get some flack back but look at the Bible and all the flack over that! So I think I'm in good company. Thank you, john
 
What is the problem? To increase HP you have to increase displacement. At least in those days. The inline 6 was the best way to get up towards 100 HP. Not sure what else a marketing man would have needed. Usually, they pushed for more HP regardless of engine layout, number of ground speeds, improved hydraulics, 3pt hitch, etc. IH moved into 6 cylinders for the 460 and 560 and that was that. Another thing limiting to 4 cylinders in increased power is if the engine is too wide it impacts mounting loaders, cultivators, pickers, etc.
 
yes, I remember in the later 1970's I would go into the john deere shop here in town and they had all these 4 wheel drive tractors doing a recall, on diff I think it was. think it was 8430 tractor.
 
Dr. Evil. Enjoy your write ups on IH over the years. Like they say, somebody with his feets on the ground who was there.

Pete
 
Frankly I don't see Deere's powershift in the 20 series much of a game changer, more a fledgling technology that Deere forced its customers to beta test.

My understanding is it had some similar disadvantages to IH's hydrostatic drive, the biggest of which being power loss. I also understand that they weren't the most durable or reliable systems at that time.

Not to mention, it was only 8 speeds, and extremely harsh shifting. I've heard many a Deere fan call it the "Jerk-O-Matic."

I've never seen one in person, despite having looked at dozens of 20 series Deeres over the decades. Never seen a powershift 30 or 40 series either.
 
The 20 series power shift was extremely durable and in the field speeds not jerky. I cultivated quite a bit of corn back in the day with a 3020 power shift and found it
handy for varying heights in the field. Power reduction was more noticeable in the smaller tractors as there was an absolute "cost" to the system but the "cost" was less
in the larger 20 series tractors. All that aside the power ratings were all sorted out in the Nebraska tests and a customer knew going into a dealership that an early 3020
diesel synchro would be rated for around 65 hp while the power shift version would be rated for 5 HP less. No reason for anybody to feel that they got cheated. Case 70
series had the title of "jerk-o-matic" around these parts. Anyways, I have the 50 series 15 speed power shift in one tractor and the power reduction is extremely small.
No different than a Magnum from the same era.
 
(quoted from post at 16:20:53 01/17/20) Went over this several times over the years and just covered some the other day. New differential to accept tapered roller bearings. New housings that support differential and accept much larger ball bearings on the new bull pinion gears that match the new bull gears that have a 25 degree pressure angle verses 20 degree old ones.

Later an additional improved bearing package was released that included flat bower roller bearings on inside axle, new looser fit outer axle ball bearing, new lubrication tube to lube bull pinion bearings and new pinion bearing. Tapered shim on right side of differential for better even loading of differential bearings under heavy load.

That bearing package was not a recall but had a very special price on the bearings. Probably less than half price.

The 460 bearing package also had bower flat roller bearings on the bull pinions but the 560 did not. Actually the 460 had a lot more failures because people replaced their Super M's and power packed M's with a 460 in a lot of cases.

Once most of these tractors were relieved of their heavy tillage duties, when 06 series came
along, very little repairs in rear. Still a lot of them here in the country a well liked tractor.

When IH introduced these tractors they advertised the 560 as a five bottom tractor and the 460 as four bottom. They had plowing demonstrations in this area doing just that. Well, the 806 was more of a 5 bottom rig as it turns out. Sure, some 806's pulled six but all the ones we sold did five or less.
Excellent answer to a question based on experience and knowledge, Thank you very much Sir

I don't know if I woke up on the wrong side of the bed or is the Internet increasingly becoming a place for opinions as opposed to facts
This thread is full of opinions IMHO :lol:
 
You are right. IH was falling behind JD in the horsepower race. The 720 had more hp then the 450 and in order to correct that IH rushed out the 560.
 
JD didn't force anybody to buy the power shift. And I don't know how you could have not seen 8 speed in your life time. They are not rare. Even out here in wheat country were there are not near as many row crop type tractors verses the corn belt you could find powershifts.
We had one our 4020 too. Also, you could adjust the speed of the shifting on a powershift to take some of the jerkiness out. There was some very slight hp loss with the powershift, but there was HUGE power loss with the hydro. The hydro was an excellent PTO and loader
tractor but not good at much else. IMO I don't think IH gained anything over the long run by offering the Hydro. The fact that they had to rename some of the models because farmers and salesmen were getting duped or confused on how much power they had tells you that. I
don't about the 20 series but I have been told that the 8 speed powershift was actually more durable then the quad range. There is a reason JD only offered the powershift in the 4840.
 
I think the 8630 got most of the updates. 8430 didn't have enough power to destroy itself. One thing neither IH or JD did all that great was 4 wheel drives.
 
The rigid steer tractors were made all the way up to the mid 90s. In fact that last ones were basically rigid frame Steigers.
 
The only jerkiness I ever observed on the 8 speed was going from 7th to 8th and letting off of the foot throttle smoothed that out quite well while shifting. The 8 speed went a very long time unless the filter and fluid changes were not performed or the tractor was seriously abused.
 
If you read my replies it would become apparent that I am not really down on the 60 series. Yes, IH stubbed its toe but it sure was not the disaster that others made it out to be. The JD 4010 may not have been the bull tractor the IH 806 was but it sure had features that farmers wanted. Even guys who were far more IH in their loyalties admitted that the 4010 and 4020 had a number of desirable features that did not make you feel wore down at the end of the day.
 
OH, I read your replies. But the original question pertained to IH problems with the 60 series. Then it kind of strayed so I threw in my two cents. I worked on quite a few green ones also. They had some good points and some lousy ones like all the rest.
 
Yes, I know they made a ridgid frame Steiger. We sold the CASEIH Steigers. But the original Case was a point of some disagreement. When Tenaco combined the two companies, one of the first thing that the Case people said at the meetings was that they would never make a articulated 4 wheel drive.

They hung on quite a while but CaseIH could not sell enough of them to compete with other 4 wheeler and then they purchased Steiger. I was at the first training session CaseIH put together in Fargo when they bought the place. Still painted the ones going to Steiger dealers green and others red.
 

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